Mark Hayden

Mark Hayden is an English author of contemporary fantasy, best known for The King's Watch, a long-running urban fantasy series beginning with The Eleventh Hour. The books follow Conrad Clarke, a former Royal Navy officer drawn into a secret magical society tasked with policing supernatural threats across modern Britain, with titles frequently built around numerical and card-suit imagery, from Tenfold and Nine of Wands to Eight Kings and Five Leaf Clover. Hayden has supplemented the main sequence with King's Watch Stories, shorter works filling in the setting's background, and has written the separate Operation Jigsaw Trilogy and the Tom Morton series. His work is grounded in English settings and institutions, blending police-procedural structure with an increasingly detailed system of ceremonial magic.